Living in a DRM land ...

Well my computer hard disk died and among other things that I didn't have backups for was my mp3 music collection. Luckily my music was on my iPod so I thought cool ... I won't have to re-feed my CDs to my computer. After installing XP and iTunes I learned the truth, there is no Apple sanctioned way to get the music back off of the Ipod. So if you re-associate it with your new iTunes install it will basically take over the iPod and load the new library ... erasing the "foreign" library in the process.

Luckily by harnessing the power of my search engine I was soon able to find a neat utility called iPod Agent that helped me copy my music library back onto my harddrive (among other neat things it does). Although it was slow to pull off the several Gigs of MP3s via USB it was able to do so without me having to intervene, unlike I would have if I had to manually feed it CDs to re-create the library.

So this leads me to wonder about the not so distant future where the "DRM bit" would have been set on the usb connection and I would have been out of luck, cursing the record labels, and the hardware manufacturers for the better part of a weekend.

Well, here's to hoping that my pessimism is just that ...